Both Parties Obliged to Reassess Washington’s Role

Amid all the fears that the daily headlines now carry, like spores on the wind, into every corner of American life, conservative activists have had another anxiety in the disorienting days since Sept. 11--that the war against terrorism will undermine their own decades-long war to retrench the federal government. In conservative circles, the lament is expressed with the finality of a mathematical equation: Wars expand government. The truth, in this unconventional war, is likely to be far more complicated.

On some fronts, it is inevitable that this war, like its predecessors, will increase Washington’s role. At times of crisis, Americans instinctively demand that the federal government shoulder responsibilities that suddenly seem too important for other hands. This crisis has already triggered that reflex.

The federal government’s authority to monitor and detain suspected terrorists will expand. Washington will become a bigger player in airport security--though the notion of completely federalizing that responsibility, which the Senate approved last week, may not survive resistance from the White House and conservatives in the House of Representatives. The confused local responses to last week’s outbreak of anthrax exposures guarantees a larger federal role in confronting bioterrorism. Washington is opening its checkbook to rebuild New York City and compensate the attack’s victims. And now that the airlines have picked the taxpayers’ deep pockets to cover their losses from the Sept. 11 hijackings (and probably from years of mismanagement before then), other industries, like insurance, are clamoring for their share. They probably won’t leave the capital empty-handed.

These initiatives will all mean new regulations and more spending, just as the conservatives fear. But they only partly explain how the crisis is recasting Washington’s role. Most of the new responsibilities that the attacks are imposing on the federal government are related to internal and external security (with a subset devoted to stitching a safety net under corporations staggered by the attack). But even as the crisis inspires a bigger government presence in those arenas, it has significantly set back Democrats’ hopes of a new Washington offensive in the traditional domestic priorities of health, education and social welfare.

“It wasn’t just the World Trade Center that was obliterated on Sept. 11, it was the whole liberal wish list agenda,” says Steve Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee.

Moore’s point may be overstated, but only slightly. In this age of diffuse dread--where the shadow of airplane wings above a kid’s soccer field on a sunny Saturday now causes a flutter of anxiety--the national security state will thrive. The nanny state--as conservatives like to call the Democratic vision of an expansive, activist government--is likely to face a much rougher time. “It is obviously going to make it harder to do what we want to do,” acknowledges one senior Senate Democratic aide.

Since at least the second half of Bill Clinton’s second term, Democrats have been remarkably consistent about what they want to do. Early in his tenure, Clinton worked to rebuild public support for an activist federal role by supporting a balanced budget and welfare reform. Having laid that groundwork, Democrats in the late 1990s unified around a series of proposals to steadily expand Washington’s reach--in funding local education reform, subsidizing prescription drugs for seniors and regulating health maintenance organizations. That’s the agenda Al Gore ran on in 2000. That’s the agenda Senate Democrats were hoping to advance, until the first plane hit the World Trade Center.

The attack achieved what all of Clinton’s reforms never quite could: restore a widespread sense of public trust in government. Yet the paradox is that the crisis has simultaneously made it almost impossible for Democrats to translate that new trust into new spending on the domestic priorities they care most about.

Several distinct dynamics are weakening that Democratic agenda. Most obviously, the attack has shifted attention away from their priorities toward the new threats of terrorism. Polls still show significant public concern about the day-to-day challenges of better schools and health care. But it’s virtually impossible to sustain attention on those issues while the press and political leaders themselves are consumed with the metastasizing terrorist threat.

Democrats find themselves stymied more by the challenge of finding ways to disagree with Bush at a moment of crisis, even on issues unrelated to the attacks. That doesn’t mean congressional Democrats will acquiesce to everything Bush demands. But hardly any believe they can challenge Bush’s resistance to ideas like raising the minimum wage as forcefully as they might have before Sept. 11. “Democrats have to be creative in advancing the agenda they support without attacking the commander in chief,” says the senior Senate Democratic aide. “The president--or maybe the presidency--is not just wrapped in the flag at times like this; he is the flag.”

The biggest hurdle for the Democratic agenda is the most practical: The huge federal budget surpluses that made it possible to consider new spending initiatives have vanished under the combined effect of the Bush tax cuts, the cost of responding to the crisis and the slowing economy. Washington is now looking at a return to deficits--not the modern sort of deficit where the government taps Social Security money to pay for other programs, but an old-fashioned deficit where it spends more than it raises in Social Security and general revenue combined. That prospect, says one well-connected Democratic consultant, is already forcing party congressional leaders to search for scaled-back ways to advance goals like providing prescription drugs on the cheap. That won’t be easy.

Even in wartime, politics never ends. The advantages Bush enjoys in shaping the agenda today will evolve and perhaps erode; history suggests that the enormous popularity he’s enjoying today is no guarantee of reelection in 2004. But for now the crisis has immeasurably increased Bush’s leverage in his domestic disputes with Democrats. And that means on issues beyond national security this war is more likely to constrain than expand Washington’s reach into American life.

*

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: www.latimes.com/brownstein.